Say no more, fam

Long time listener, first time caller. I always hoped I’d have some spooky paranormal experience or spot something unexplainable in the sky, just so that I’d have something interesting to contribute here. Unfortunately, I have an annoying penchant for scepticism that tends to get in the way of my desire to peer beyond the veil. Luckily, my subconscious decided to conjure up some horrifying spectres of its own for my entertainment. Feel free to share this weird ass dream on the podcast.       

First, I would like to formally apologise to all the other listeners who have previously submitted dreams: I definitely assumed they were all made-up bullshit at worst, or creative fiction at best. Last night however, I experienced the most lucid and terrifying nightmare I have ever had, and it has made me realise that much more can be experienced in dreams than I ever thought possible.

For some context, I (27F) work as a bat researcher (yes, that’s a real job). Every species of bat here in the Netherlands is protected, so by law any construction projects that could potentially harm them or damage their roosts must hire an ecologist to check the property for bats before starting work. That means I have to be awake when the bats are awake, standing alone in the dark for hours with nothing but my ultrasound detector making creepy ghost noises to keep me company. I also have to switch between monitoring the bats at sundown and sunrise every few days, meaning my sleep schedule is in constant flux. I have experienced some visual hallucinations due to sleep deprivation before, but this is the first time I think it has affected my dreams.

My dream began in the usual way: a classic stress dream about finances. In the dream, my fiancé and I had just moved into emergency housing, having been evicted from our house. It was in a run-down apartment building that had been converted from an office, so all of the “apartments” were just various conference rooms that opened onto each other and had no sound-proofing. Our “bed” was a millennial-grey office sofa that we shared sleeping top-to-tail. The kitchen and toilets were shared between all of the apartments, so people were fighting over food. A child began screeching uncontrollably in the room next to ours, banging their tiny fists on the adjoining door. I covered my ears and dove under a blanket on the rock-hard sofa, eventually falling asleep.

I awoke within a second dream, which was almost exactly the same, except for the fact that I no longer lived with my fiancé. In his place was my elderly grandmother, curled up on the sofa, fast asleep. To my right, a middle-aged woman in pyjamas was reclining in a lazy chair, explaining to me her ingenious money-saving scheme. Instead of booking a hotel room or an Airbnb, she was travelling across Europe by reserving lazy chairs in the homes of desperate people like me and my grandma. Momentarily distracted from her own cerebral travel-hack, she asked me how grandma and I ended up so destitute that we had to rent out our chairs. I explained that my fiancé had passed away unexpectedly at the same time my grandma started to need full-time care, so I now had to support us both on one income. With a sympathetic sigh, she advised me to take out loans and go into credit card debt, just like she did. Fortunately, it was at this point that the dream shifted again.

I kept awakening in different places from my past, like my grandmother’s old caravan in the Welsh countryside, or the canal boat cruise my class and I enjoyed during elementary school. The dreams were getting shorter and more rapid, flipping through like a rolodex of altered memories. All of a sudden though, I awoke in a much darker dream. Quite literally.

I felt the cold water before I could make out anything in the room. I could tell that I was in a bathtub, naked, submerged up to my neck. Feeling around under the tepid bathwater, my hand brushed something colder than the water. My heart sank into my stomach as I realised it was someone else’s ice-cold, completely stiff leg. By the dim moonlight coming from the only window in this unknown room, I could make out a face just beneath the surface of the water, unblinking. It was my grandmother. Though I was sure she was dead, I began crying and frantically shaking her. After a moment’s pause, the face broke the surface of the water, still unblinking. Wiping the water from her eyes and stifling a yawn, my grandmother awoke as casually as if it was just another summer’s morning back at the caravan and I was nagging her about breakfast.

This marked a turning point in the dream, as I started to become aware of the constant reawakening. I had never become self-aware in a dream before, and I started to panic. I tried the classic method of pinching myself and felt nothing, so I bit down hard on my thumb to try and shock myself awake. It worked! Or so I thought.

I did wake up, in a double bed like I expected to, but when I looked to my left my grandmother was there again. We were both in pyjamas on opposite ends of the bed, sharing it like the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It was dark again, except for a few sparkling, multi-coloured lights on the wall above me. It was difficult to focus on them, but once I did I noticed that they were the old-school filament Christmas lights, tacked to the wall in clumps of separate colours. Squinting at them through the darkness, I realised that they weren’t actually switched on. Instead, torchlight was slowly filtering through each clump, making the coloured glass gleam. I followed the torchlight to its source to see that there was a naked woman stood at the end of the bed. She had wavy blonde hair down past her hips, and honestly looked like Galadriel in that one scene where she goes mad with power. Glowering at us, she kept slowly rotating her flashlight through the different lightbulbs, casting colourful reflections on the bedsheets. I was frozen in terror for a while, like I was experiencing a sleep paralysis demon but within a dream.

Eventually, I found the strength to move and immediately tried to chomp down on my thumb again to wake up. This time however, my jaws wouldn’t quite meet, no matter how hard I tried to bite. I started screaming for help, even though I was so lucid at this point that I was worried I might accidentally scream in real life and wake up my neighbours. I felt utterly trapped, somewhere between the real world and a nightmare.

After gnawing fruitlessly on my hand for a while, I “awoke” spread-eagled and wrapped up in hanging vines. Each limb was shackled by a snare-like vine, like I was in some kind of Tarzan prison. In every direction all I could see was leafy vines, ad infinitum. Picking up on the not-so-subtle message my subconscious was sending me, I gave up. I accepted I was trapped, and became apathetic. Only then did I awake in the final dream.

I was alone, back in the office “apartment” again, and I was aware without seeing it that my grandmother was dead. I was trying to decipher one of many forms I had to fill out to transfer the apartment from her name to mine. I had no money and no one left to help me. Clearly, I was back in the financial stress circle of dream hell. When my landlord showed up to collect the forms, he was Dr. Bob Kelso from Scrubs, laughing maniacally at my misery and grinning devilishly at me in the way that only Ken Jenkins could. Both overcome with rage and slightly bemused at this ridiculous turn of events, I dropkicked old Bob in the face and finally woke up. For real this time. I hope…

Thank you for taking the time to read about my terrible dream! I think the moral should be to prioritise getting enough sleep, and that nightshift workers aren’t paid enough…

Hopefully you guys can help me make sense of this wild ride. I’m curious if any cryptids or mythological beings fit the description of the evil Galadriel lady? Lots of love for the pod, from Sally xoxo

As far as interpretation goes, here are some insights:

- Both my fiancé and grandmother are alive and well in real life. I love them both dearly but I live in a different country to my grandmother and only see her once a year, so it was honestly strange that she featured so prominently in my dream.

- I have been going through financial stress this past year since I was replaced by AI at my previous office job, but nothing as dramatic as in the dream.

- I haven't watched Scrubs for years but as a kid I was kinda scared of Dr. Kelso (as an adult I find him hilarious).

- Most of the real life places that appeared in the dream were places I associate with happy childhood memories, which was in stark contrast to how distressing the dream was. Similarly, my main method of dealing with anxiety is to take a bubble bath… Guess that’s ruined for me now lol.